Murder victim's grandmother: Everybody loved Aaron'

WEST CHESTER — Aaron Turner was born on Christmas Eve, his mother’s first child and her self-described “Christmas present.”

That being so, Angeline Blaylock told the jurors hearing the death penalty case against the man convicted of killing her son that Christmas was not necessarily her son’s favorite holiday.

It was Thanksgiving that held a special place in his heart, she said.

“Thanksgiving is coming, and Aaron loved to eat,” Blaylock said in emotional testimony Tuesday before the seven men and five women who are being asked whether to sentence Laquanta Chapman to death or to life in prison for the gruesome 2008 murder of Turner, a 16-year-old high school student who drew Chapman’s wrath over a drug transaction.

Advertisement

“How can he not be there for that?” she asked tearfully, anticipating the upcoming holiday. “Now Christmas, Thanksgiving, all the holidays, will never be the same. We will all sit at the table, but there will be an empty seat. Aaron is not going to come and sit with us any more.”

Blaylock was one of four of Turner’s family members who testified in the penalty phase of Chapman capital murder trial, questioned by Assistant District Attorney Michelle Frei, who asked in her opening statement of the sentencing hearing that Chapman be sentenced to death.

Frei quoted the Robert Louis Stevenson as saying that, “Every man shall one day be seated at a banquet table of consequences, and today the defendant sits at that banquet table, stripped of his cloak of innocence.

“Today you get to see him for who he really is,” Frei told the panel. “A convicted, cold-hearted murderer, who committed an intentional, willful and deliberate killing of 16-year-old Aaron Turner.”

Chapman was found guilty last week of shooting Tuner multiple times in the basement of his South Chester Avenue home after stripping his clothes off, then later dismembering his body with a pair of chain saws and disposing of body parts in trash bags that investigators believe ended up in the Lanchester Landfill.

Turner’s body has never been found.

The defendant’s attorney, J. Michael Farrell of Philadelphia, told the jury that despite the horrible crime, he would present evidence of how Chapman was raised in an abusive environment that would show he should not be given that ultimate punishment.

“We are not saying anything about escaping punishment,” Farrell told the jury in his opening statement. “We are talking about life in prison without release. What does justice require? The reasoned, moral choice of life.”

Turner, 16, was killed on Oct. 30, 2008, after he left his home across the street from Chapman’s on the way to a community service program about four blocks from his house.

Blaylock told the jury that she still cannot bear the time of day when she last saw Turner leave their home, three o’clock in the afternoon, even four years later. “I have to think about my son walking out of my life and never coming back,” she said. “That was the last time I saw him.”

The prosecution, in asking for the death penalty, is citing as an aggravating factor Chapman’s criminal record of violent felonies that showed an extreme indifference to the value of human life. In 2000 and again in 2003, Chapman was convicted of an assault that included pointing a firearm at another person. Both times, he was sentenced to 18 months in a state prison.

As part of their deliberations in deciding whether to impose the death sentence, the jurors are also permitted to take into account the impact that the victims’ murder had on his family and loved ones.

Turner’s grandfather, his two grandmothers and his mother all testified that Turner had been a special child, beloved by all his family for his sweet disposition and respectful demeanor. He was smart, ambitious, athletic, and a constant presence in their lives. One by one, his grandparents spoke about how he would call them or visit them as often as he could, if only just to see what they were doing or ask them for something to eat.

He was close to his siblings and cousins, and was looked up to as an older brother would be, Claude Turner, his grandfather, testified. It seemed as though the only thing that bothered Turner was the fact that his father had been killed while Turner was still a young child, and he grew up missing him.

“He was a good boy,” Claude Turner said of his grandson. “And the streets grabbed him like they grabbed his father.”

Geraldine Turner, his maternal grandmother, said that he would call her every day on the telephone, sometimes as many as four times a day, to talk with her. When he went missing, and his murder unsolved for months and months, she continued to think that she would be able to get in touch with him by telephone. “I kept calling his phone number,” she said “We all tried to figure out, ‘Where could he be?’”

And Valerie Feaster, his paternal grandmother who took him on vacations and let him visit her in Philadelphia, summed up the sentiment of all those who spoke of him expressed to some degree. “Everybody loved Aaron.”

Not so of Chapman, said Farrell in his opening statement.

Chapman was born in the projects of Newark, N.J., a place that Farrell referred to as “Brick City,” a desperate place that he returned to again and again as he was shuttled between family members and foster homes. Farrell said that even as a young child, his father abused him, sending him to the hospital, and his mother, a drug addict at the time, abandoned him.

He told the panel that he would present testimony from experts to show that the kind of “poverty, neglect and abandonment” that Chapman suffered from the time he was born led to a psychological damage that manifested itself in post-traumatic stress disorder, for which he was being treated at the time he committed the murder.

“This is not normal,” Farrell said in an animated and passionate statement. “It has an inescapable effect on the life of a child.”

“There are two stories to tell here,” Farrell told the panel members. “It is their story for death, and my story for life.”

It is uncertain whether Chapman, who did not testify during the first phase of the trial, would take the stand during the penalty phase. Farrell did not refer to that in his opening. During the Turner family’s testimony, he kept his eyes on papers in front of him, taking notes, and held a hand on his chin.

In her opening, Frei told the jury that by taking into account the impact Turner’s death had on his family, the law recognizes “that murder victims are not simply props or irrelevancies in a murder prosecution.”

“Aaron Turner was a real person,” she said. “He was the center of a family’s world. They had dreams for Aaron’s future, and he had dreams for his own future. His murder has forever changed that family, and that change has not been for the better.”

“The evidence will show that Aaron Turner deserved to live, but the evidence will also show that the defendant has earned a penalty of death,” Frei said.